Sports science keeping Eagles on cutting edge

Bradley Fletcher said of the sports science methods the Eagles employ, "I think it definitely helps us. Guys are definitely able to make plays and feel good during the game."

Bradley Fletcher said of the sports science methods the Eagles employ, "I think it definitely helps us. Guys are definitely able to make plays and feel good during the game." (MICHAEL KUBEL, THE MORNING CALL)

By Nick Fierro

Can coach Kelly's sports science regiment keep Birds on cutting edge?

— Call Chip Kelly a successful salesman for getting his Philadelphia Eagles players, who are technically free to do what they want, to do exactly what he requires and feel good about it.

When he took over as head coach last January, he changed everything from the way the locker stalls were arranged at the NovaCare Complex headquarters to the way the fields were lined just outside. He stopped taking them away to training camp at Lehigh University. He moved the start of practices to around noon to better get their bodies into a rhythm for the many 1 p.m. starts they would be facing each Sunday.

But that was just the beginning. He monitored what they ate and at what times, monitored how much they slept and at what times and hired four full-time staffers, including sports science coordinator Shaun Huls, who made his bones training Navy SEALS, just to handle the team's conditioning needs.

Then, despite no NFL experience whatsoever, he persuaded the players that Tuesday practices were actually a good thing, and one full day off a week was all they would need, so long as they slept a minimum of eight hours a day and ate, drank and worked out at the exact times his conditioning staff required in their individualized programs.

So here was this guy who not only came into their locker room, but their kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms as well.

And turned their lives around.

Flashing forward to the start of this 2014 season, which they begin today by hosting the Jacksonville Jaguars, and Kelly's sports science is felt all over the place.

They believe they're the finest-conditioned team in the NFL and prove it every day by not even breathing hard as they come off the field after the fastest-paced practices in the history of the game.

That Kelly just keeps running one play after another with no huddles and as few as 5 seconds between the end of one play and the beginning of the next has as much to do with his conditioning program as his actual offense, which he likes to run at the same pace for long stretches during games.

They're coming off a season in which they won the NFC East crown without losing anyone to season-ending injuries after the season began.

And while they lost to the New Orleans Saints in their one-and-only playoff game last January, it wasn't because their bodies weren't ready to keep going another 16 weeks if necessary.

"I've always been real big into taking care of myself," safety Nate Allen said early last week, "but doing all that when Chip and them got here, it kind of just brought a whole new perspective to us, because they had all the science knowledge.

"I This is the best I've felt. And last year, it was the best I felt going into a playoff game. You know, usually by the end of the year, most teams are beat up, got quite a few guys on IR. That wasn't the case here."

Allen admitted only that "it took a little adjusting to" when Kelly introduced the Tuesday practices during the week. All other teams around the NFL generally have Tuesdays completely off after just coming in for video sessions and treatment on Mondays.

Not so with Kelly, who presented research to back up his assertion that the team would be better off just taking Mondays off (during a regular work week before Sunday games) and going with a light practice on Tuesday. He also tweaked their weekend work, going much lighter than most teams go on Friday, but then turning up the intensity a bit on Saturdays, when other teams just go through their walk-through mock games.

"It gets the blood going and makes us fresher on Sundays," Allen said. "I'm all for it. I can't even imagine doing it the other way now. I like it a lot."

Cornerback Bradley Fletcher, who came over from the St. Louis Rams, didn't know what to expect at first, either. But he became a convert almost immediately.

"I like what we're doing here," Fletcher said. "Everything that Coach Kelly puts in is only to make things better for us and to put our bodies in a better situation so we can go play well on Sundays.

"I think it definitely helps us. Guys are definitely able to make plays and feel good during the game. We want to keep doing that this season."

Video monitors in the weight room were a first for Fletcher as well.

"We can see like how we're looking, like, say, during a squat, what our form is looking like, say, if a guy is leaning on one leg or another," he said. "We can monitor reps. There's definitely things I hadn't seen before, and they're definitely beneficial to us here."

What linebacker Connor Barwin came to learn was that Kelly's emphasis on sleep helped him most.

"I was always of the mindset that if you get a good night's sleep two nights before the game, one night before the game, you're good," Barwin said. "He showed us the data and convinced all how important it is to get your sleep every night.

"There's a lot of things we do differently here, but that was the biggest part for me, and I felt better."

And yet there's also a certain amount of stealth associated with this stuff.

All of the players confirm that the program has been tweaked to fit in with their evolution as athletes and keep up with the changes in their bodies and ages. Yet none were inclined to give any examples.

"There's stuff that I'd rather not get into," Allen said. "But we feel good. We know everything that's being done works because it's worked before."

Past, present and future, Kelly seems to have all the tenses covered with a sports science program that can never quite be defined.